Anyone who likes to print out there own DVD covers needs to check out http://www.steamcovers.com they have some nice covers for games on steam.
I presume its intended for people who want to back up their Steam games but if they do that on a regular basis then why not buy the retail boxed game which comes in professional packaging with a manual and costs less? :? I think I might be missing something here though...
I wonder about this too. If somebody wants a physical copy, wouldn't it be MUCH more convenient to buy a physical copy instead of burning a DVD and printing a cover?
Exactly my point. I guess some people like to spend more money on their digital games then waste time and additional money making a backup copy. Better to just buy a large capacity external hard drive and back up all your Steam games on to that rather than mess around tediously burning discs IMO. Well... if they really want to... who are we to question it? :3eyes:
depends at what time you make the backup. you can include patches. which will never be included on the physical copy. for a game with large patches (BF2 / moh airborne) , it sounds as a good idea.
do the updates allso backup,last time i did a restore from backup I had to do all the updates as well?
yeah they do. i have tried this with the witcher 2 recently. so i think it works on all games like that. hope im not wrong though.
I'm pretty sure that Steam just backs up whatever you have downloaded at that point in 1 large file or multiple (and I think they are encrypted).
I just like to have all my games in dvd cases, and some games you buy off steam cant be bought in a store. So I backup to a dvd and print a cover for it. Just the way I like to do it.
This is pretty silly way to think. What happends if your large TB drive bits the bullet? Looks like you would be re-downloading all those GB's to get your games back and that would directly effect someone like you being on a limited GB cap now wouldn't it? It is much easier to go out and buy a 15 pack of DVD's for $15 bucks and simply back-them all up to dics! Then if you have a lightscribe drive like I do, you can lightscribe the game box image right to the disc and it looks profesional! And as an added bonus, you can have some pride in what you created on your own...
You guys must have pretty slow connection speeds. I can download most games from steam extremely quickly. It's easier to just set which games I want to have on my system and go do something else for a couple of hours than waste my time farting on with dvd's. Not to mention I fail to see the point of wasting storage space using physical (disk based) backups in this day and age. As for the "What if the hard drive dies" - so what if it does? What if your disks get scratched, or damaged? Just get an external hard drive enclosure which lets you swap your own drives and a couple of storage drives. They're cheap as dirt now. I run a lot of storage on my computer and have done for many, many years. The number of hard drives I've had die on me over that time period isn't worth mentioning. The number of disks I've had problems with is a large reason as to why I prefer purchasing most of my stuff digitally. As for pride for using lightscibe? Yes, it looks nice. But come on man, surely you have a higher opinion of yourself than to feel pride over burning a DVD and running lightscribe to put a nice looking image on the disk.
I fail to see the point in using external drives. Why have another piece of hardware on your PC desk sucking up hydro and space with wires getting in your way when you can simply have discs put away in a safe place taking up no noticable space around your PC desk? Also with discs you never have to worry about hard drive's dying losing all data. Losing data on a HDD is pretty common in this day and age. On the price front I can buy a spindle of 100 lightscribe DVD's for less then an extrenal HDD!
IMO it's much easier and faster to buy 2TB HDD (less than 70€) with ESATA case (cheap) and use that for backups. It would take 24 dual layer DVD's to backup my Steam games. Self burned DVD's aren't that reliable anyway. It would take ages to burn those, fastest burning speeds aren't reliable. But anyway, if that work for you then it's fine, I guess. For me, HDD is the way to go.
An external drive means you can put it away in storage for when you need it, just like a DVD - only it takes up far less space than multiple DVD's. Your point fails horribly considering that is the very reason (portability) for external drives. I've already commented on hard drives dying, and if the drive is rarely in use it isn't wearing down as quickly, it makes a non-issue even less of a problem. Even when in use hard drives are far more durable than a DVD or CD. Not to mention as Anarion stated: Burning 20 + dvd's is far too time consuming and ultimitely defeats the point of backing up at all when it's something like Steam games.
